Hey! Thanks for being here for Edition #8. You're one of 205 subscribers, and I genuinely appreciate every single one of you.
A year ago, my LinkedIn posts were pulling in a couple hundred impressions each. Now I'm averaging half a million a month on LinkedIn, and this list keeps growing every week.
None of that happened from one lucky post - it's just consistency, week after week, showing up even on the weeks where nothing feels like it's landing.
If you're building something right now and it feels slow, that's usually what it looks like right before it takes off. So, keep going.
Let's get into it.
The Pentagon is now competing with Wall Street for the same talent pool - and paying up to do it.
Its Office of Strategic Capital is offering $400,000+ salaries to VPs and directors from Goldman, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan and Bank of America to build a deal team deploying up to $200B in loans and guarantees into semiconductors, shipbuilding, hypersonics and critical minerals.
$5B in direct loans already closed, $14B more in signed term sheets across 30+ sectors, and a $100B critical-minerals financing program launched in July.
Civil service pay tops out near $191k, so the White House invoked a special pay authority to clear the higher numbers - and even at $400k, most hires are taking a seven-figure pay cut. Senator Elizabeth Warren has opened an inquiry into the conflict-of-interest risk of bankers allocating state capital while expecting to rotate back to the firms that underwrite alongside these deals.
Worth watching if you're in private credit or infrastructure debt: cheap, long-duration government loans lower a project's risk enough to pull private lenders off the sidelines. This program is shaping deal flow, not just headcount.
Watch the breakdown: The Pentagon Dangles $400k Salaries To Headhunt Wall Street Bankers
Also this week:
The secondary market just hit $121B, and the best deals never make it to the open market. Private asset secondaries hit a record $226B in 2025, up 41% year-on-year - H1 2026 alone saw $121B, the first time GP-led deals have outpaced LP exits in four years. As Evercore's Nigel Dawn put it, secondaries are no longer a distress trade - they're now core to how LPs and GPs both manage liquidity.
Ares is eyeing a $3.4B private credit secondary sale - LP stakes in the fourth vintage of Ares Capital Europe, still in discussions. Private credit secondaries hit $15B in 2025 (up from $3B in 2019), with $28B projected by 2026. Pantheon, Benefit Street Partners/Coller Capital and GIC are all in the same lane - private credit is becoming a tradeable asset class. (More on this below.)
What's crossing my desk and my conversations this week:
A data centre investor walked me through the chip problem most people underwriting these deals aren't pricing in. Hyperscaler builds take years, but the GPUs inside them move much faster - B200/B300s launched near $8/hour and are now trading closer to $4, with next-gen Vera Rubin chips rumoured at $10/hour. Every new release resets the clock on the last generation, which makes these projects genuinely hard to underwrite on tech risk alone. Before he'll even discuss the tech stack, he wants power secured and live first, and he takes a 25-30% deposit on total contract value to cover build cost upfront.
A lender financing private jets across Asia cracked a market most banks won't touch by going where relationships, not cold outreach, get you in the door - in APAC, the major players are government- or family-owned, and you get introduced or you don't get in. She lends against private jets and commercial vessels (tankers, LNG ships included) across APAC, the Middle East and Europe, new builds and existing assets both on the table, minimum $10M ticket with no cap, targeting 7-15% returns for capital providers. Her read: the jet is rarely the risk - the person sitting in it is. She underwrites the borrower first (net worth, business history, guarantees) and just closed her first deal with a client whose net worth sits mostly in stablecoins.
Two deals I underwrote this week:
A secondary position in Anthropic, underwritten at a $1.2 trillion valuation. Three months ago the company was valued at $380B. This isn't a primary round - someone who already holds shares wants early liquidity, and I've got access to that position at a discount through my Family Office network. Almost nobody's willing to sell right now, and that imbalance is what's pushing the price up - so you're likely buying the secondary at a very high mark. What makes the business work is real enterprise traction: Claude sells intelligence by the token, most revenue comes from enterprise customers, and Claude Code has become a major growth engine. Downside protection comes from massive institutional backing, a large and sticky revenue base, and compute supply being locked in. Strong fit for UHNWIs, Family Offices, and Institutions.
A $70M data centre park in Australia I passed on. This is a large industrial site with grid infrastructure being pitched as the base for a future data centre and energy hub - a genuinely unique project on paper. Grid connections like this usually take ten years to secure. This site already has one: a live 132kV substation sitting on rail, ready to scale toward 350MW, with a rail spur on the Sydney-Melbourne line. I passed because the land wasn't owned and the sponsor barely had skin in the game.
How I actually grew inbound from investors on LinkedIn. A year ago I had 8,000 followers and no inbound. Now I'm at 17,500+ and investors are landing in my inbox on their own.
A few things made the difference:
Picked 3-5 content buckets and stuck to them instead of chasing topic variety - repetition beat range.
Posted more of what already worked rather than spreading onto new platforms. Going from once a day to twice a day (weekends off) did more than adding a second channel would have.
Personal posts built more trust than any deal post - my life, my career, how I think - because they show I'm just a normal guy doing the best with what I've got.
AI shapes ideas, not captions. I trained it on my own past posts so anything it drafts still sounds like me.
Every connection request gets a reply, asking what brought them to my profile and how I can support their goals over the next 6-12 months. That one question has turned into more calls than anything else I do.
None of it's a hack. It's consistency, a bit of AI leverage, and treating LinkedIn like a network instead of a sales channel.
Given everything above on the secondary market, it felt right to use this space differently this week.
The secondaries market isn't just a story I cover - it's a growing part of what's actually moving through Capital Arbitrage. As more of the largest private companies stay private for longer, early shareholders, employees and pre-IPO investors are increasingly looking for liquidity before a public listing, and that's opening up access to positions that used to be nearly impossible to get into.
Right now I have secondary opportunities on offer across: Anthropic, OpenAI, Neuralink, Databricks, Revolut, Canva, Moonshot AI, and more.
If you're a Family Office, UHNWI or institution with interest in any of these names, reply to this email, and I'll walk you through what's available.
Also live: the Top 35 Data Centre Lenders & Finance Specialists report. Built from 12 months of lender conversations, it's a 65-page breakdown covering 35 specialist finance profiles across equipment finance, private credit, bridge lending and GCC capital - who they are, their mandate history, and what they actually look for on the buybox (asset type, ticket size, geography, structure). It also gives you the fastest way to get the right contact - key names to reach out to, plus an easy way to pull current, up-to-date contact info instead of chasing a stale inbox.
It's live now at capitalarbitrage.co/dclenders ($497).
That's all for this week. See you next Friday.
— Jordon
P.S. I get 500,000+ monthly impressions on LinkedIn and a growing list of private capital readers right here. If you'd like to get your company, fund, or raise in front of this audience, just reply to this email.